“You ready for today’s op?” Eric asked.

“Sure,” Gage responded automatically. “You?”

“Always, man. Gotta put the bad guys in jail and make the streets safe for innocent women and children.”

It was a much-used line and common joke within the PD, but for some reason, hearing it this time sent a stab of something cold and painful through Gage’s chest. His heart squeezed, and his ribcage seemed to tighten around his lungs.

Turning his head, he glanced at the inside of Eric’s locker. Aside from a small magnetic mirror and CPD decal, the door and sides were covered in family photographs. Eric and his wife. His wife and three children. School pictures of each of the kids as they passed through several different grade levels. Eric, his wife, and the kids all together in front of a tree at Christmas.

He had a family, seemed happy, didn’t appear to spend every minute worrying about what might happen. To them, or to him. Other officers-both in undercover or other departments-were married with children, as well, he knew.

How did they do it? How did they not go crazy with the knowledge of all the bad things that could happen to the ones they loved?

He wasn’t afraid of much in this world-hell, as a cop, he’d faced just about everything there was to be afraid of-but the idea of losing Jenna to violence, to having her hurt in some way and being powerless to stop it… He’d rather have his guts ripped out and stomped on while his heart was still beating and he was alive and conscious enough to feel every twinge.

The idea of having kids with her and having to worry about them, too…

He broke out in a cold sweat and realized his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

Okay, this could not be normal. For the first time, he began to realize that maybe his concern for Jenna and their possible progeny might be slightly over the top. What other explanation could there be, since the other men in his unit, other men in his line of work, didn’t seem to suffer the same reluctance to reproduce?

“Hey, Cruz?” he said in a quiet voice, the words scraping past his raw, dry throat.

“Yeah?”

He shifted back a step from the row of lockers and took a seat on the low wooden bench running between. “Can I ask you something?”

His tone must have alerted his friend that something was up because Eric’s movements slowed and he cast Gage a curious glance. “Yeah, man, sure. What’s up?”

“Your family. The wife and kids. They’re good?”

Eric’s face lit up, his mouth lifting in a smile as though someone had flipped a switch.

“They’re great, thanks.”

“And you don’t worry about them?” Gage asked.

“ ’Course I worry about them. But that’s what this is for.” He patted his chest, his palm covering the small gold cross he wore there. Always, whether it was visible or tucked inside his shirt.

Gage shook his head. “No, I mean worry about them. With all the shit we’ve seen, everything that’s out there ready to take somebody down whether they deserve it or not… Aren’t you afraid something will happen to them?”

For the first time, Eric turned to really look at him. If anything, the eye contact, the sudden intense scrutiny, made Gage nervous. He felt like enough of a pussy bringing this up to begin with; he didn’t need a coworker peering too deeply into his soul.

“I suppose if I stopped to think about it, I would,” Eric replied. “But life’s too short, man. I mean, anything could happen to any one of us at any moment. You could walk out of this building and get hit by a bus. I could trip on a shoe lace walking down the stairs and break my neck.” He shrugged. “No one to blame. Nothing anyone did or didn’t do to cause it, just an act of Fate.”

“But bringing a baby into the world,” Gage pressed. “There’s some dangerous stuff out there. Don’t you worry something will happen to them? To this innocent kid who has no way to protect himself? To your wife?”

“My wife can take care of herself,” Eric said with a chuckle. “Hell, she scares me sometimes, so I have no doubt she could bring down any jerk-off who so much as looked at her funny. She can protect the kids, too, for that matter. But to be safe,” he said, voice growing serious, “I’ve shown her a few self-defense moves. Taught her how to fend off an attack and not be too squeamish to kick a guy in the nads, if she needs to.”

Gage thought about that for a minute. He’d seen Jenna pissed, and it wasn’t pretty. No doubt she could take a man’s head off at ten paces with nothing more than a book end. (Something he unfortunately knew from personal experience.)

For that matter, since she carried those damn knitting needles around with her ninety percent of the time, she could probably stab an offender in the eye, throat, stomach, groin, thigh… anywhere she could reach. And if he taught her how to do that effectively, how to use her keys as a weapon, her purse as a weapon, her entire body as a weapon…

“What about your kids?” he asked.

Eric considered that for a moment, then said, “You know, with the kids, you pretty much have to protect them twenty-four-seven the first few years. But there’s not a lot to protect them from, street-wise, so you just keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t swallow anything smaller than their eyeballs. After that, you start teaching them, too. You teach them to look both ways before crossing the street, not to take candy from strangers, to deal with bullies at school, say no to drugs… the usual.”

“It’s that easy?” Gage asked doubtfully.

“Not quite that easy, no,” Eric admitted with a small shake of his head. “But if you do it right and raise them to see and understand the dangers, then you don’t have to worry so much about them falling into something they can’t handle.” He paused for a moment, then gave a little hmph of sound. “I guess that’s the real secret. You do the best you can to prepare them to handle whatever situations they might come across, then you pretty much have to let go and pray they make the right decisions.”

The tightness in Gage’s chest and abdomen hadn’t abated, but his mind was running about a million miles a minute, and he was relieved when Eric didn’t ask why he was suddenly so interested in all of this. He pretty much let the conversation dwindle on its own, then went back to prepping for their drug-bust operation, and Gage did the same.

Could it really be as simple as his friend made it sound? Oh, he knew raising a child wasn’t a simple matter by any stretch of the imagination, but was it possible it wasn’t the nightmare of hidden traps and dangers he’d envisioned? Folks had kids every day, right? Yeah, one was occasionally found dead in a snow bank or wandering the streets alone. But a lot weren’t.

And he could cross the fear of parental abuse right off the list, because there was no way he or Jenna would ever hurt or neglect one of their own children. If he had his way, he’d pretty much smother them in bubble wrap from head to toe the minute they were born, so even getting a paper cut would be virtually impossible.

It was too much to digest all at once, but Eric had given him something to think about. Given his rock-solid determination of the past couple years to avoid fatherhood and vulnerability at any cost, he considered that progress.

When Charlotte pulled her long, wood-panel station wagon up to her house, she’d been gone almost a full two weeks, was running on Zingers and Mountain Dew, and had to tinkle like a toy poodle.

Jenna’s car, with its adorable magnetic daisies stuck all over, was nowhere in sight. Not that Charlotte was surprised. It was, after all, Wednesday night, and she only had about an hour to hit the potty, check her darling babies-oh, how she’d missed them while she was gone-unhitch the U-Haul from the car, and get to The Yarn Barn herself.

Throwing open the driver’s-side door, she scooted around the front of the wagon, then hotfooted it into the house and headed straight for the bathroom before the little fender-bender in that expo building parking lot became only one of the accidents she had to account for from her time away.